Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal
- Nov 15, 2017
- 3 min read
★★★★☆
First some background: I was baptized in the Catholic Church as an infant, and again in the Southern Baptist Church at the age of eight. After my mother’s second divorce in 1986, we left Tulsa, Oklahoma, and, though I doubt it was a conscious decision on her part, religion behind. Fast forward to my senior year of high school. Thanks to a friend and a second PETA-supplied paperback copy in the school library, I discovered Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. I became a vegan before I’d finished the book (and remain so more than 26 years later), and my self-identification as an atheist occurred around the same time. After all, I wasn't having anything to do with any religion that would allow for the subjugation of animals. As I’ve grown older, my view of the world, my place in it, and my beliefs about it, aren’t quite as black-and-white as they were when I was a teenager. Though my attitudes and feelings about capital-R Religion haven’t softened in the slightest, my relationship to—and curiosity (fascination?) of—spirituality, faith, and belief have grown more complicated.
All of which brings us (finally, some of you may be saying) to Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. If you didn’t know that Moore is a humorist (I did, though this is my first of his books to read), you should certainly be able to tell by the title. And if the title appeals to you, you’re probably someone who doesn’t take religion too seriously (or at all). So, if you like humor and are open to a story in which “the missing years” of Jesus’s life are told in a completely speculative fashion, this book is for you. Of course, humor is a very personal thing, and what’s funny to one may make another groan. Moore’s brand of humor, as opposed to Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Tom Robbins, David Sedaris, etc., may not be your bag, but that’s no reason to dismiss Lamb outright. Nor should it be dismissed for its historical or biblical inaccuracies, as some have wont to do, because that’s just missing the point, isn’t it?
Yes, Lamb is funny and crude. It’s also tender and heartwarming, though the mix of the two sometimes felt uneven. It’s a buddy story at heart (think Frodo and Samwise), and though the stories and humor quotients are wildly different, I was frequently reminded of The Lord of the Rings. Like Sam, Biff isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but he’s the best kind of best friend: he’s intensely loyal, even when he doesn’t really understand what they’re doing or why, and he’s always there when it matters. But what struck me most about Lamb, and why it’s so much more than just a funny story about the Son of God and his childhood friend, is that it managed to make Jesus more human, and by extension his ministry more righteous. That is, Moore brings it all back to what Jesus and his Word was really all about, which, unadulterated by religion, remains a pretty good (if not entirely original) message: the golden rule. Unfortunately, those who could most use Moore’s imaginative but not-so-fantastical tale of Jesus and his journey to become the Messiah will never find their way to it. And that's a damn shame.
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